CD Projekt RED’s game has taken a small step closer to the real world, and it took a great deal of work to achieve this!
Night City has a unique style. Many geek fashion brands have tried to copy V’s iconic samurai jacket, but recreating the stand-up, light-up collar is obviously challenging. One YouTuber took on the challenge. Zibartas, a hardware developer and cosplayer, has already created several Cyberpunk 2077 props, including motorized mantis arm blades and an Arasaka helmet. He also recreated the yellow bomber jacket featured in the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime. He built LEDs into the stand-up collar to create a glowing effect. However, Zibartas has now significantly upgraded the jacket by equipping it with a flexible OLED collar.
Their goal was to recreate the rare black-and-white version of V’s bomber jacket – the NUSA Infiltrator Jacket seen in the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion. The inner collar in the game features an animated display, so Zibartas set out to create a collar lined with flexible OLEDs. This was no easy task. Their plan was to acquire several of these panels and assemble them into a full-circle screen, concealing the hardware and lining. These panels are primarily manufactured for high-end phones and tablets, so the selection of sizes is limited, and they are expensive. One panel costs about $300, and four were needed for the entire collar.
Another challenge was playing the video in sync on even just two flexible OLED displays. Small Raspberry Pi computers are usually preferred for this type of wearable device for practical reasons, but they only have a single hardware decoder. This means that they can only play one video smoothly at a time, causing the image to stutter across multiple devices. Zibartas switched to the older, less limited Raspberry Pi 4, which enabled them to find a solution in which the single decoder works smoothly on two screens. This alone took a week of work. The base of the collar was made out of fabric and EVA foam, which went much more smoothly until it was time for a test fit with one of the flexible OLEDs. Although this technology is advertised as flexible, the displays are fragile and cannot withstand bending. Zibartas chose a sandwich-like design for the collar base, aiming to simply slide the OLEDs into place. Unfortunately, this led to a costly setback.
While the screens are flexible, the wires leading to them are not. Because of the sandwich structure, the wires had to withstand bending they weren’t designed for. After several weeks of experimentation, Zibartas created a semi-rigid frame that is flexible yet resists twisting. They slide the flexible OLEDs into place on a rail and carefully attached hard end caps to protect the delicate wires that broke last time. Since the flexible OLED screens are Linux- and HDMI-compatible, Zibartas can play Cyberpunk 2077 through the jacket’s collar. After mounting the frame onto the EVA foam base, the rest of the jacket was all that remained.
Creating costumes by hand is no easy task, especially when you’re not working from an existing pattern. However, Zibartas approaches this part of the project with a software solution. The cosplayer designed the patterns from scratch in Clo3D based on the in-game mesh and a few screenshots. They designed the coat’s angular patches in Autodesk Fusion and then ironed these heat-transfer patterns onto black fabric. Finally, they sewed the patches onto the coat. Fortunately, the cosplayer could sew well. It’s delicate work, but at least they don’t make mistakes so severe that they have to throw everything away and start over.
We can’t wait to see what Zibartas sews in the future!
Source: PCGamer
